Criminal law scholars regularly maintain that American prisons are overcrowded and that defendants in custody wait long periods of time before having their cases brought to trial. A similar refrain is made of the penal process in India – the world’s largest democracy, an ally of the United States, and a country with a judiciary that has drawn upon American criminal procedure law. In fact, the situation in India is thought to be much worse. Accounts of prisoners languishing behind bars for several years – and sometimes decades – awaiting their day in court are not uncommon. And many Indian prisons are one hundred-to-two hundred percent over-capacity, where conditions are squalid and weaker inmates face serious physical harm.

In this study, we examine the current state of the Indian criminal justice system. Beginning in 1979, the Indian Supreme Court, referencing the American constitution’s Sixth Amendment, held that defendants had a fundamental right to a speedy trial. We examine the evolution of the Indian jurisprudence on this matter, which has been quite favorable for defendants, but then move beyond this line of inquiry by empirically evaluating whether the positive court rulings have translated into tangible changes for the criminally-accused. As our findings suggest, there exists a major gap in India between these encouraging judicial pronouncements and how this right plays-out in reality, which we believe provides an important perspective for comparative and criminal law scholars.

Crime victim recoveries are typically available in American states through three separate, but related, avenues: a criminal proceeding (with or without a formal charge); a related civil claim (including a pre-suit settlement); and, a related administrative or special court proceeding. Multiple avenues can be pursued simultaneously. These avenues often, but not always, have constitutional as well as statutory foundations.

A federal judge on Friday denied a stay of execution for murderer-rapist Albert Greenwood Brown but gave the condemned man a choice whether to die Wednesday by a single injection or the state's recently revised three-drug method.

In this article, Professor Loewy introduces the Fourth Amendment topics debated in the 2010 Texas Tech Criminal Law Symposium. Part I of this article begins with a critical overview of the Supreme Court’s use of history in resolving Fourth Amendment questions. Part II analyzes the values that the Fourth Amendment protects, emphasizing the concept of “reasonableness.” Part III evaluates the use of the exclusionary rule to enforce Fourth Amendment values. Professor Loewy concludes by recognizing his article’s overall unfavorable appraisal of the Supreme Court and inviting the symposium’s other speakers to share their opinions.

A minor student from Pennsylvania, identified in the lawsuit as N.N., settled with Tunkhannock Area School District and school officials for $33,000. As is typical in settlements, the school did not acknowledged any wrongdoing in the cell phone privacy case. N.N.'s claims against the District Attorney's Office were not part of the settlement, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. N.N. filed a federal complaint against the District Attorney's office with the help of the ACLU.

Judges have warned for decades that misconduct by prosecutors threatens the Constitution's promise of a fair trial. Congress in 1997 enacted a law aimed at ending such abuses.

Yet USA TODAY documented 201 criminal cases in the years that followed in which judges determined that Justice Department prosecutors — the nation's most elite and powerful law enforcement officials — themselves violated laws or ethics rules.

BELL, Calif. — The investigators from the district attorney’s office showed up at the mayor’s house early Tuesday morning, arrest warrant and battering ram in hand, banging on the door. When the mayor, Oscar Hernandez, ignored their shouts — “Come out!” and “Put your hands up!” — they rammed down the door and arrested Mr. Hernandez on charges of looting the treasury of his own city to enrich himself.

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According to the authorities, some of what these city officials did was legal, taking advantage of loopholes in the law, but much was not. For example, Mr. Adams, the former police chief, whose salary was a third-larger than that of the police chief of Los Angeles, Charlie Beck, was not charged. “We did not find any evidence with which to charge him,” Mr. Cooley said.

“She is clearly the head of this serpent,” the judge said of Teresa Lewis in 2003 when he sentenced her to death by lethal injection, describing her as the mastermind of the cold-blooded murders of her husband and his son as they slept in rural Virginia.

Late on Tuesday, the Supreme Court denied her last-ditch appeal for a stay, and Ms. Lewis, now 41, is scheduled to die on Thursday night at 9. Her case has drawn unusual attention, not only because she would be the first woman executed in the United States since 2005, and the first in Virginia since 1912, but also because of widely publicized concerns about the fairness of her sentence. Ms. Lewis waited this week in her prison cell, reportedly soothed by intense religious faith.

Today, an increasing chorus argues that risk-assessment instruments are a politically feasible way to resolve our problem of mass incarceration and reduce prison populations. In this essay, I argue against this progressive argument for prediction: using risk-assessment tools to decrease prison populations would unquestionably aggravate the already intolerable racial imbalance in our prison populations and will not address the real source of mass incarceration, namely the admissions process. Risk has collapsed into prior criminal history, and prior criminal history has become a proxy for race. This means that using risk-assessment tools, even for progressive ends, is going to significantly aggravate the already unacceptable racial disparities in our criminal justice system. Instead of turning to prediction, we need to address prison admissions. Recent evidence suggests that our carceral excess was not so much fueled by the length of sentences, as it was by the front end: new admissions. The real solution to mass incarceration, then, is not to cut short prison terms though prediction, but to reduce admissions to prison.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Five hundred cameras installed in three of the city's busiest transit hubs started feeding live images to the police department's high-tech security network Monday and will be monitored in counterterrorism efforts.

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A single high-bandwidth fiber optic network connects the cameras to a police computer system. That allows investigators to set up programs that search for suspicious activity, like an object in one place for a long time. The analytic software also is designed to take video and catalog it according to movements, shapes and colors, so officers can set parameters to search the system for anyone wearing, say, a red jacket.

They can also scroll through footage from any camera in the network going back as long as images are available. The department usually purges the images in 30 days.

Criminal procedure is organized as a tournament with predefined roles. We show that assuming the role of a defense counsel or prosecutor leads to role induced bias even if people are highly motivated to give unbiased judgments. In line with parallel constraint satisfaction models for legal decision making, findings indicate that role induced bias is driven by coherence effects (Simon, 2004), that is, systematic information distortions in support of the favored option. These distortions seem to stabilize interpretations, and people do not correct for this bias. Implications for legal procedure are briefly discussed.